Forty-Four Years On, Metro Still Runs the North Side

Every Chicago band that has ever mattered has a Metro story. That is not hyperbole; it is close to municipal fact. The room at 3730 N. Clark has been the north side's rite-of-passage venue since 1982, and in a summer when the whole city is bracing for Lollapalooza's out-of-town glare, it is worth remembering that the single most important stage in Chicago rock history seats about 1,100 people and sits above a dance club.

The origin story is by now legend. Joe Shanahan, fresh off a stretch soaking up New York's late-'70s art-and-music underground, opened the venue in the old Northside Auditorium Building — a 1927 hall originally built as a Swedish community center. Then a young Athens band called R.E.M. played the room in its very first summer, on July 25, 1982, and the booking philosophy essentially wrote itself: catch them on the way up, and make the room a place bands want to come back to. That first year alone reportedly brought New Order, Depeche Mode, Killing Joke, and Billy Idol through the doors.

The local roll call is the part that matters most to Chicago, though. Metro was where Naked Raygun and Big Black turned punk into a civic institution, and it is famously where Smashing Pumpkins played both their first and their last gigs — a symmetry almost too neat to be true, except that it is. Downstairs, Smart Bar opened the same year and became a temple of Chicago house, hosting the genre's architects, Frankie Knuckles among them. Rock upstairs, house down below, one building: it is the whole city's musical identity under a single roof on Clark Street.

Shanahan has spent four decades as the rare club owner who is also a genuine scene elder. "I never thought of myself as a businessman," he told Newcity in a 2015 profile that doubles as a history of the modern Chicago scene, and the venue has largely operated like it — booking on instinct and loyalty rather than pure spreadsheet.

Which brings us to now. During Lollapalooza week, Metro is once again a marquee aftershow room, with a run of late-night club sets scheduled from July 28 through August 2 — the kind of sweaty, oversold, you-had-to-be-there nights that no festival field can replicate. Forty-four years in, the pitch has not changed: a great band, a low ceiling, a thousand people who care, and a staircase down to the house-music afterlife. The rest of the country builds new venues to feel like this. Chicago just kept the original open.

Sources: Metro Chicago — Wikipedia; Impresario of the Moment: Joe Shanahan — Newcity Music